1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming system and an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known to provide image forming apparatus wherein the destination for a facsimile transmission, email transmission, file transfer, or the like is identified with reference to address book data, and various kinds of data that are transmitted to the destination. The address book data includes a plurality of attribute information items on each user. In recent years, image forming apparatuses, such as a multifunction peripheral, are being provided with an increasing number of functions and are capable of communicating with external apparatuses using various forms of communication, which increases the number of attribute information items.
When address book data is stored on the image forming apparatus, the data is managed by a Management Information Base (MIB) and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is often used to edit the address book data (addition, deletion, or modification of the attribute information item) from a client apparatus using a computer network. In this situation, each attribute information item for each user included in the address book data is set as an MIB object. To edit the attribute information items for a plurality of users requires communications via SNMP to be performed a number of times that corresponds to the number of attribute information items and the number of users. Therefore, it can take a long time to register or acquire the plurality of attribute information items on the plurality of users.
FIG. 5 (the related art) is a schematic diagram of an example of a process performed when user attribute information items included in a user registration information item for one user are set via SNMP. As illustrated in FIG. 5, the number of steps necessary for communication is great even for one user, which means that it takes a longer time to register user registration information items for a plurality of users.